The Cult of Failing Upwards

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1:51New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. at cementmobile.com. CoolZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, CoolZone Media's happiest podcast. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:15Better Offline. As I've run through in the last two episodes, Managers of Poison takes ability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics on companies you love while isolating and removing those that don't agree. And by the way, they're the same people who actually build things and make good products and use them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta, a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction with their products or any value to society. Since 2009, Facebook's core products have reliably become more profitable at exactly the same rate they decay, with every founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about how much they hated working there.

3:10According to a New York Times piece from 2018, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, taking the spotlight away from that of Facebook itself, an app he kind of stole from the Winklevosses. Systrom allegedly didn't really want to leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of resources, and now, and I quote, seemed to want Instagram to use its momentum to help the Big Blue app, which is an annoying way of describing a situation that feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a Kara Swisher piece.

3:45Despite Swisher's bloviating, it took TechCrunch's Josh Constine to reveal the real reason that Systrom had left. Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of product, Kevin Well, who everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in May 2018. you know, that great year for news. And that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take over and over the next six years, he would absolutely destroy everything that Systrom and his co-founder, Mitchell Krieger, had built. According to Constine's reporting, Systrom had also clashed with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time. Constine described Masseri as a Zuckerberg loyalist who was, and I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of Facebook gig that went to Will Cathcutt, who now heads up WhatsApp.

4:38Over time, Masseri and Zuckerberg moved to erode Systrom and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess it all became too much to bear. Systrom was there to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in June 2016, two years before he left, that horrified users who feared that they would now not see posts from their friends, a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook, which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in 2015. Wait, wasn't that when Adam Masseri was... Oh my god! Anyway.

5:17A few months later, Instagram would try and clone the functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of Stories. By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat. They just didn't, anyway. This move was illustrative both of the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also of its future direction, with Stories serving as yet another touchpoint for advertisers, and yet another thing that Mark Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things and have ideas. Once Systrom left, Musseri became the head of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable business units in history while destroying its basic functionality as an app that showed you photos and videos from people you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability to interrupt and annoy you and stop you from seeing things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored content seemingly at random, but the one thing you can rely on is it would do it a lot.

6:17Since taking over Instagram, Adam Masseri has, with the direct approval and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turned the app into a glorified ad network, devoid of any ability to innovate, with products like IGTV and Threads. By the way, not the social network. It was a camera app built to compete with Snapchat, which has also been shut down. Neither of them found traction, and every change under Masseri seems to be a direct copy of either Snap or TikTok. cock. It's also important to remember and know what Adam Masseri is. Adam Masseri is not a creator. He's not an engineer. He's not a founder. He's a designer that found his way into product management, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things into the beautiful pantheon of wearing suits and yelling at people.

7:06Okay, okay. I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he definitely annoyed them. And in late 2020, he made arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching Reels, a 15-second video format for Instagram built to compete with the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram, flooding your feed with 15 and eventually 60-second clips that automatically play as you scroll by, each one engineered or paid to get in the way of things that you actually want to see. And I really want to be clear, though. There are people who are going to say, well, surely, surely, Ed, the fact that Reels was such a runaway success, well, that's proof that it was good, right?

7:52Wrong. Horribly wrong. Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook now. Systrom's worry, and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, his worry was that Zuckerberg was trying to just turn Instagram into an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account. This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook, but with more visual media. It has the same logins. It has the same problems. It also has no customer support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry, thanks to Adam goddamn Misseri, you can now pay$15 a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which will also get you access to customer support.

8:38Great goddamn idea, Adam. Burn in hell. Anyway, I'm not the only one angry with Adam Masseri. He's also one of the least popular tech executives in history, and I'm not kidding. I have been reading the tech media very deeply for, Jesus, coming up on 16 years? Bloody hell. Anyway, I've never seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk. And even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far more riz than Adam Masseri, who mostly spends his time apologizing. No, seriously. Since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways, and I'm not kidding about that one.

9:16He's had to apologize for Instagram censoring pro-Palestinian content. He's had to testify before Congress about Instagram's harm to young people, and he's had to tell people that Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app. What does the gram? Anyway, he's overseen so many deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who between them have over 600 million followers, had to beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok. To which he responded that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time and claimed that it had cut back on recommended content, something i think we can all agree was a blatant fucking lie i find adam missary very annoying as well because when you watch his videos he's always going hey guys yeah so yeah so the reason that instagram's bad now is because uh and you can see him in real time trying to come up with a reason why it sucks that isn't just well it makes it it makes us so it makes me so rich i have a house in Kensington now.

10:17I'm so rich. It's so good. He's just, he's worm-like. I don't want to get into personal insult. I take that back. Adam Masseri is not worm-like. He is a coward though. He is the reason that Instagram sucks now. He is the architect of the destruction of one of the most dominant places on the web. These are his decisions. Masseri, like many of the most powerful men in tech is a glorified management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Masseri has already announced that Threads, Meta's dollar store clone of Twitter, is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made by a company that has a rich history of screwing over news organizations.

11:03Also, what the hell do I talk about on social networks then, Adam? no nothing that's happening in the government or otherwise well oh wait let me answer that on threads what people talk about is whatever's making them angry that day without much form or feature and they still talk about politics and news it's just not supported by the algorithm it's just it's the kind of thing that you would make if you had no idea how social networks worked but you knew product management. If you were like, what do people, what do we want to see out of a social network? We want to see lots of clicks. We want to see lots of scrolling.

11:42Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging. That's what makes good social networking, right? And I think we can all agree at this point that Twitter was a mistake. It was like a text-based platform. I don't think Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product people, but they were smart enough to leave it the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files, which by the way are very funny because Matt Taibbi sold his soul to Elon Musk, the most deceptive man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks. Didn't think the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway, the Twitter files, all you can see in there is Twitter's executives just being like, I don't want to touch it, mate.

12:22I don't want to. If we mess with it, it's going to make it bad. It's going to break. Everyone will be so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person. We shouldn't change this. Threads is this weird, hyper-optimized, hyper-algorithmic crap fest. And all the people on there are people who write comments on Instagram. It sucks. And there are some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that. But it's a bad social network. And it's a bad social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't build products. Unless you think of products as like financial vehicles, in which case, Adam Masseri may be the most gifted man alive.

12:56But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Masseri's consultant mindset more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a new type of family-centered account in Instagram that would permit Meta to upsell Instagram to children under 13. A disgusting, loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against Meta filed by the Attorney General of New Mexico. Yeah, Adam, I wouldn't come without a link because I'm scared. Anyways, this is the man running one of the most important tech platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can or will do as the profits of making it harder to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich.

13:53he comes out every so often babbles about how social is important how the changes he's made that make instagram worse are actually good and then disappears up his own asshole one time he responded to something i wrote on the information and he responded with a bunch of typos which was very funny but he also responded saying that facebook planned no layoffs and instagram planned no layoffs they laid people off six months later it's just this is the guy these these are the guy's in power now. While much of the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg, it's important to remember Mark sucks, and Mark is the reason.

14:32He did the original Facebook after he stole it from the Wett brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand the sheer level of damage that Adam Masseri has done to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product. It's terrible. And Masseri's only response to the pain and frustration of his users is to tell them that he intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making Instagram like TikTok. He said, I'm actually going to make it more like TikTok, you fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. He just said there'd be more video.

15:09They've claimed they're rolling things back, but it's all nonsense. It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences, and they do so because they have giant monopolies. And then they make their products worse and worse and worse once they know that their users can't or won't go anywhere else. And what's insane about this is Instagram could have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking. There are honest ways to do a business like this. if they really actually invested in algorithms. And I kind of hinted at this in previous episodes and made it so it was just very good at showing you things you like.

15:49Hell, they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well? Because its algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is actually very good at showing people things they find interesting. It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad. But guess what? Meta's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of billions of dollars into the metaverse still. Reality Labs is still burning, what, 10, 15 billion dollars a quarter or a year? It's an insane amount of money. How about feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck ass? I'm being vulgar, and I've been quite vulgar in this episode, and I apologize.

16:26I really do. I shouldn't swear so much. My mother tells me this. My father tells me this. My shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad guys keep winning. And the reason they keep winning is nobody points at them and says how bad they are, or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people should walk out of Instagram. We should stop using Instagram and Facebook. I think I use Instagram like once every couple of days, look at my friend's very fat dog, which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say, can you just send me pictures of your dog?

17:03But that's kind of weird. These apps have become part of the social fabric and people like Adam Masseri are aware. Same with Mark Zuckerberg. They know exactly how well they've done and they have. They are a success story, an evil success story, but they're a success story. You are on Instagram. You are on Twitter. You are on email. You are on these platforms because that's where people exist online. There are people that I can only speak to on Instagram. They're just bad at text, but they love Instagram. And it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms. And I imagine you don't want to either, which is why it's important to talk about who messed them up.

17:43It's important to say Adam Masseri a hundred times and keep saying it. That's the only way that history will know who has done this damage. And these management consultant types, They're everywhere. They're everywhere. And they're inspiring people to be like them, to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers, but excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground, one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers, or in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything, to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a crazy story for you.

18:25recently a generative ai on facebook responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child and you may think i'm mistaking something no no it said this whole thing about having a gifted child this is what happens when people who don't know product who don't build anything who don't understand anything get the keys to the kingdom they fuck it up and they'll keep doing so And their massive success only seeks to inspire generations of useless founders, obsessed with creating profitable pain boxes over useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked-up, loathsome one of them all is rising to power.

19:04I'm talking about Sam goddamn Altman.

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20:59More choices, less compromise. Visit buyatoyota.com for a great deal on an efficient Toyota today. Toyota, let's go places. now if you don't know who that is sam altman is the ceo of open ai which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company building software to do something and generative ai might do something you should go back and listen to the episodes about that but i want to tell you how sam altman got started and i want to let you know how shit sam altman has been at his job in the past In 2005, Altman, a Stanford dropout, co-founded a company called Loopt. That's L-O-O-P-T. That's what companies were called back then.

21:43And they were a location-based social networking app that raised over$30 million from tech incubator Y Combinator and VCs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven years later, Altman would flog Loopt to a publicly traded financial services company called Green Dot, best known for their prepaid cards, for a remarkable$43.4 million, despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or revenue. Altman got quite rich from the Loop deal, despite the fact that a group of senior employees urged the board on two separate occasions to fire Altman for what they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior, according to the Wall Street Journal.

22:22Altman would almost immediately become a partner at Y Combinator, surprising a lot of people, after working there part-time, before being made president by co-founder Paul Graham in 2014. Yet behind the scenes, according to reporting by Elizabeth Dwoskin and Natasha Tiku of the Washington Post Altman was well known for, and I quote, for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture. Altman was also double dipping in Y Combinator startups by investing through Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack, with one source quoted by the Post describing Altman's tenure as the school of loose management that's all about prioritizing what's in it for me.

23:04Altman became wildly rich during his tenure at Y Combinator, using his connections and his cult of personality to make early investments in companies like Gusto and Optimizely, which was acquired in 2018 for$1.16 billion, and Patreon, and Asana, and Reddit. Probably made a couple hundred mil on Reddit. Really depressing. In 2015, he founded OpenAI, at the time a non-profit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications. Yet it's really important to note that Altman is not and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He did code, but he was, in every case from what I can find, a figurehead and a fundraiser that was able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman and Wojciech Zaremba and Ilya Sitzkeva to do the actual work at OpenAI, while he sent masturbatory emails to Elon Musk, who only ever donated$50 million of the$100 million he claimed he'd invested in OpenAI.

24:03You know what the thing is, Sam? At the very least, can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are you that much of a coward? Anyway, I really want you to remember that Sam Altman was an absentee parent for the first few years of OpenAI. He split his efforts in actually a way that was very similar to Elon Musk across multiple other investments and enterprises, like the two funds he built inside of Y Combinator for him to run. In 2019, according to reports at the time, Altman would step down from Y Combinator amid a series of changes at the Accelerator, a story that much of the industry press just simply chose not to look into.

24:41Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit for calling people out for this. Kind of in vain. Yet the Washington Post's reporting revealed that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets and very long, quite boring blogs, that's my job, Paul. Anyway, he flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to personally kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for some reason. Anyway, due to Altman continuing to focus on his own personal projects and press over his thing at Wicombea. This is the story of the man who New York Magazine called the Oppenheimer of our age in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth, when I think the truth might be far simpler.

25:30Sam Altman is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published in early 2021, Sam Altman proposed the concept of Moore's Law for Everything, referring to the principle that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing power in the process. And if I got that wrong, I just, I think it's right. Okay, anyway. Moore's Law for Everything is, in essence, a utopian take on the impact of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and services, and thus the cost of living, will go down exponentially.

26:05something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history. The problem with this piece is it's kind of like Sam Altman in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing. It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI will lower the cost of goods and services because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain and suggests things like that we should tax capital rather than labor by creating an American equity fund where companies are forced to give up a percentage of their shares to a nationally incorporated venture fund. An idea that makes sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies to public companies.

26:38Moore's Law for Everything is a remarkably telling piece in that it frames Altman's worldview as one where the only thing that can save mankind is startups, and those startups should be funded in the way that Sam Altman likes. And this piece feels a lot like everything in Altman's universe. Endeavor actually connects Moore's law to anything, which, I should add, isn't so much of a law as an observation that has long ceased to be relevant as the shrinkage of transistors has slowed in recent years. In many respects, this comparison is actually eerily prophetic given the slowdown and even regression of improvement we've seen in large language models like ChatGPT.